Campaign Action
For the second time in the month, the American Bar Association has deemed a judicial nominee from popular vote loser Donald Trump "not qualified" for a lifetime seat in the federal judiciary. Unanimously, with one abstention.
[An] eight-page statement from the ABA detailed numerous concerns from Grasz's colleagues in Nebraska about his fitness to serve on the federal bench—including whether Grasz was committed to judicial precedent and if he would be "unable to separate his role as an advocate from that of a judge."
Some of his colleagues interviewed by the ABA as part of its evaluation process said Grasz's behavior was "gratuitously rude." The bar association also noted that a 1999 article Grasz wrote argued that the lower courts should be able to overrule Supreme Court decisions on abortion rights because "abortion jurisprudence is, to a significant extent, a word game."
"In sum, the evaluators and the Committee found that temperament issues, particularly bias and lack of open-mindedness, were problematic," Pam Bresnahan, the chair of the ABA's standing committee that reviews nominees, said in the statement. "The evaluators found that the people interviewed believed that the nominee's bias and the lens through which he viewed his role as a judge colored his ability to judge fairly."
Sounds like the perfect Trump nominee, no? This is the second nominee the ABA has determined not qualified this month. The first is Charles Goodwin, to serve as a US district judge in the US District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma. There hasn't been a single nominee deemed not qualified by the ABA since 2006, so this is a very rare occurrence.
Maybe not coincidentally, Trump is following the lead of George W. Bush and not consulting the ABA in identifying nominees. Since Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, the ABA has provided pre-nomination evaluations of judges, a vetting process that has three metrics: professional competence, integrity and judicial temperament. An ABA committee identifies an evaluator who reviews the questionnaires nominees fill out for the Senate Judiciary Committee, researches opinions and other writings by the nominee, and conducts extensive interviews with the nominee's colleagues. Never, says the ABA, is a candidate evaluated for their "philosophy, political affiliation or ideology." The evaluator also meets with the candidate to give him or her the opportunity to respond to "adverse comments" that might have come up in the vetting process. It's a system that's worked for 60 years, allowing nominees as politically divergent as the late Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg to ascend to the Supreme Court.
Qualifications, however, don't matter to Donald Trump or to Mitch McConnell and Chuck Grassley, the senators who are hell-bent on stacking the federal courts with extreme partisans. The fact that this guy Grasz apparently believes he can pick and choose which part of our nation's jurisprudence he'll recognize makes him a perfect choice for Trump, McConnell, and Grassley. But it makes him a very dangerous person to put on the bench for the remainder of his life.
Senate Democrats, don't let this happen with meek acquiescence. Fight it tooth and nail. How much is it going to take for you to shut this down?